Hi, thanks for having a listen and taking the time with your really thoughtful feedback!
I actually tried at first to put some of these tracks through a more lo fi tape emulation to give them an old school feel and tbh I preferred them with a cleaner sound, as you say. Production isn't my strong suit but I feel like I actually did a decent job for once. 'On The Other Hand' is probably my favourite track here, that's the one where it really felt like it came together the most.
I'm really interested in the creative limitations posed by using a single synth as the basis for a whole project. The OpSix is a wonderful instrument and even tho there's well over a hundred separate tracks on this, I still feel like I've only scratched the surface. Next year I'm planning to do another album just using it, maybe something more ambient/experimental. I'm also planning another thing in this more house/Detroit vein, using another synth. Maybe the Modwave which I haven't really played with too much yet.
I see what you're saying about using Aotearoa to refer to, or refer to in part, to NZ. Being descended from soldiers who travelled to the other side of the world to kill brown people and steal their land means having some complicated feelings about ethnic identity. And everyone feels differently about it. Not to stray into the weeds too far, or get too political, for me acknowledging and respecting the status of Maori people I live with as the original indigenous inhabitants of the place where I was born is a good way to balance not being a racist dick with avoiding trying to score lib points by appropriating culture that's not mine.
I guess I should explain why this is relevant to my music making? So like a lot of people I have a few different directions I go in musically. The main two are
(1) dance music/techno like Silk Purse which I do under the name 4trx. This is stuff I do for fun, mostly - fun to make and fun to listen to, hopefully, and fun for me to explore sounds and techniques, and you know, I really like dancing so, that.
(2) which is my more serious art music under the name Landscape, which kinda gives away what my purpose with that is. Maori often use the phrase 'tangata whenua' to refer to their indigeneity which translates, loosely, to 'the people born from the land', and having a strong connection between the land and its inhabitants is a key part of Maori spirituality and identity. The art music I make - like the drone and tape loop pieces I posted recently - is about my own sense of place and the complexity of being both native born and a coloniser in a post colonial society. A few years ago I saw some of my Australian friends acknowledging the Native Australian tribes whose land my friends lived on when they created their work, and I thought it was a good practice to pick up on. Hopefully that makes sense and I don't sound like I've disappeared up my own Woke arsehole! I'm still in the early stages of my thinking about this and it's something I probably need to do more thinking and talking with other people about it.
Anyway, there you go, apologies for the essay.
Thousand Ways wrote: ↑10 Dec 2024
Very lovely stuff here.
Tainted,
It’s raining,
First go: the overall sound and twitchiness seem influenced more by
Nude photo than by
Strings of life. No bad thing. Adept reading of the Detroit “language” there. If you’d claimed that these were lost tracks by one or more of the Belleville Three, the only thing that would give the game away is that they’re maybe slightly too clean. They don’t sound like they’re from a knackered tape.
Love eyes is very nice – has some Kraftwerk/
Tour de France Soundtracks in the higher-pitched pads.
It’s also nice to find some short tracks. Not because they’re better shorter, but because I get bored of the automatic assumption that dance tracks must last six or seven minutes. Wire’s old
Pink Flag idea that you say something, have done with it, and then move on to something else seemed to get lost in the early 1990s.
Pierre is an excellent karate soundtrack. Love hearing the riff “straight” at the start and then again with filters. That was a real eye-opener. When you hear it unfiltered it sounds like nothing else. Then the filters come in, and presto! Sun Electric et al.
Based on the title, I worried that
We didn’t start might be a techno cover of Billy Joel. Thankfully not.
Interesting to read your credit to Aotearoa on the album. I know one woman from NZ who insists on saying that she’s from Aotearoa, not NZ. But I recently met another woman from there who told me that you’d only call the place Aotearoa if you were actually Maori, and not if you were a white New Zealander. I have no idea which of them is right, or maybe they both are. But it’s good to see the acknowledgement.